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Don’t be fooled by the name: Unlike the 1986 comedic classic “Three Amigos,” the Interfaith Amigos aren’t just a laughing matter.

While they are a distinctly comedic religious association, the group has its interfaith origins in the aftermath of 9/11.

After the dust from that catastrophe settled and the nation went into mourning, the first person Rabbi Ted Falcon called was Imam Jamal Rahman.

The two first met each other while serving on the board of a group that was trying to start a university.

“I called Jamal and invited him to come to the Shabbat service that Friday, because people had to see a different face of Islam than the one that was being broadcast in the media,” said Falcon, a Reform rabbi and spiritual therapist, teacher and writer. “That was the first time we heard each other teach, and we enjoyed it very much. He and I started doing interfaith programs together.”

Six months later, the two reached out to Pastor Don Mackenzie to “bring him into celebrating the first-year anniversary of 9/11” which they did at his church.

“And after that we said, ‘We can’t stop now,’ ” Falcon said. “We kept meeting. We had no idea what would happen.”

Now, 251 lectures later, the aptly named Interfaith Amigos will ask their lecture audience, “What’s So Funny About Religion? Laughter is Her Language of Hope” at 2 p.m. today, July 29, in the Hall of Philosophy. The group’s lecture is part of the Week Six interfaith theme, “What’s So Funny About Religion?”

The Interfaith Amigos got their name from a 2008 article headline in the Chicago-based magazine, The Christian Century  —  “Three faiths, three friends: Seattle’s interfaith amigos,” according to Falcon.

In addition to their lecturing, the three have published books together, including Religion Gone Astray: What We Found at the Heart of Interfaith.

“Our writing process is: Ted writes the first word, Jamal writes the second and I write the third,” joked Mackenzie, a retired minister and head of staff at University Congregational United Church of Christ. “We actually meet weekly, and when we’re writing a book we spend a lot of time brainstorming about what the book should be about. Once we get the idea generally, the book has a one-voice introduction — a chapter with an introduction in one voice — and then each of the three of us commenting on the topic of the chapter.”

The Interfaith Amigos’ devote a great deal of attention in their writing and public speaking on the exclusivity present in all three of their religions.

“Religions come into being to address difficulties, sorrows, ego, imprisonments, but also to express spiritual wisdom,” Mackenzie said. “But because our traditions also express exclusivity, there’s very little hope for cooperation in addressing moral issues.”

The bedrock of the Interfaith Amigos’ religious kinship comes from a mutual desire to break down perceived barriers between Judaism, Islam and Christianity, according to Mackenzie. 

“If we did that, we thought there’d be a better chance that the purposes of religion and spiritual practice could be realized in facing the troubles the world has right now,” Mackenzie said.

The Interfaith Amigos believe that friendship between members of different faiths is essential in today’s political and social climate.

“The key to overcoming polarization is friendship,” said Rahman, a co-founder and Muslim Sufi minister at Interfaith Community Sanctuary in Seattle, and an adjunct faculty member at Seattle University. “And not just ad-hoc friendship, meaning: meeting only at Christmas time or Rahmadan time, or high holy days. The key is really establishing an abiding, heart-to-heart human friendship. That is the best way to overcome religious, cultural or political polarization.”

Rahman said the interfaith group represents a model for overcoming such polarization.

To sum up the Interfaith Amigos’ sense of purpose, Falcon invoked the words of Hans Kung, the Swiss theologian and author:

“No peace among the nations without peace among the religions. No peace among the religions without dialogue between the religions. No dialogue between the religions without investigation of the foundation of the religions.”

“Humor is about two disjointed ideas coming together, like Christmas and July; humor is about hope and joy, and we need to remind ourselves to bring it throughout the year,” said the Rev. Susan Sparks at the 10:45 a.m. Sunday Ecumenical Service of Worship and Sermon in the Amphitheater.

Her sermon title was “It Wasn’t Exactly a Silent Night,” and the Scripture reading was Luke 2:1-7.

“You will be getting six sermons, back-to-back, about Christmas in July,” Sparks said. “You have never had six back-to-back. This will come in three stages, like Santa Claus. You know: You believe in Santa, you don’t believe in Santa and you are Santa.”

Her theme for Sunday was silence. Monday through Thursday, she will focus on the Advent themes of hope, peace, love and joy, and on Friday she will talk about taking down the tree.

“I want this journey to be for all of us, even though I have framed it through a Christmas lens,” she said.

The congregation sang “Silent Night” before the sermon.

“That carol is so pastoral, ‘all is calm, all is bright,’ ” she said. “But how accurate was that? It was not exactly a silent night.”

Caesar Augustus had called for a tax on everyone. Joseph and his pregnant wife, Mary, had to travel from Nazareth to Bethlehem.

“That is about 90 miles; it is like going from Chautauqua to Niagara Falls on a donkey,” Sparks said. “And they went from below sea level to almost 2,000 feet above sea level, a total climb of 3,000 feet.”

Sparks said she was going to attempt to reproduce the barnyard noises that might have been there.

“Over in this corner was the donkey that carried Mary,” Sparks said, and then tried to bray as a donkey would. “In another corner was Joseph snoring; that’s a sound I know. Then the sheep were ‘baaing’ over in the corner because Joseph was keeping them awake. There was a camel spitting and some chickens clucking. And there was a woman having a baby, and without an epidural, there might have been a few sounds like — ‘Joseph!’ ”

Sparks said it was not a silent night.

“That is not an alien concept in the 21st century,” she said. “We are living in the chaos of a barnyard.”

In our personal lives, she told the congregation, “we have job stress, money worries, family conflicts, health concerns and all manner of heartbreak that shout at us from all sides.”

And there are conflicts all over the world, she said.

“We have immigrant children separated from their parents at the (U.S.-Mexico) border, we have 1.2 million people in chains through sex trafficking, we seek justice for LGBT people and we see the door of economic opportunity closing for people of color,” Sparks said.

Sparks said these conflicts are underscored by much “yelling.”

“Our own citizens are yelling, ‘Send them back’; Republicans and Democrats are yelling at each other and we are circling the wagons,” she said. “We are living in a barnyard, and the noise is deafening.”

There is good news, though. After the cacophony, there is one last sound, a tiny baby crying.

“The barnyard gets real quiet, real fast,” Sparks said. “No one said anything and nothing was heard, but everyone knew that the world had changed. The Prince of Peace was born out of chaos.”

Sparks said the transition from chaos to the everyday quiet is an invitation from the Prince of Peace.

“The Prince of Peace gives us a sense of the peace, love, hope and joy that dwells in each of us.” she said. “Unless we tap that peace, we will never heal the chaos in the world and in our lives. We can go from barnyard to beauty, from chaos to quiet.”

But this transition is not easy, and Sparks wondered: If people had the internet in Biblical times, would they have missed the holy moment?

Sparks turned to the YouTube series, “If Bible Characters Had iPhones,” hosted by comedian John Crist, with his friend Trey Howard.

“One dude says to the other, ‘Did you know Joseph’s brothers were selling him? Is that legal?’ ” Sparks said. “ ‘Oh, there’s David liking Bathsheba’s spring break photos.’ ‘Did you know Saul changed his username to Paul?’ ”

Sparks’ favorite was a hypothetical post from Mary and Joseph.

They tried to get a hotel through Priceline, but all they got was a rustic barn through Airbnb.

“The electronic revolution has destroyed our ability to tap into our own holy place inside,” Sparks said. “When we turn on these devices, all we hear is the chaos of the barnyard.”

Adam Alter, a professor at New York University, wrote a book called Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked.

“The average adult, (Alter) wrote, spends 11 to 15 years of their life looking at a screen,” Sparks said. “Alter calls smart phones ‘an adult pacifier.’ This addiction has affected our ability to connect with the holy inside, not out there.”

Sparks has an app called Sanctuary, which is a virtual sanctuary that helps you sit in a pew, light a candle, listen to music and write a message on the wall near the candle.

“I tend to use it in my own sanctuary,” she said. “We don’t know how to be silent because it is not expedient or productive. ‘Useful’ is a word that destroys the spiritual life. Silence is a problem because it doesn’t produce. You have to do more to have more, and you have to have more to win.”

God is in the beauty of silence, the holy is in the silence within, even the music of silence, she said.

Beethoven wrote his ninth symphony and included the beautiful chorus that turned the symphony into an opera.

“One of the soloists had to turn him around to see the applause from the audience after he conducted the piece for the first time,” Sparks said. “He found magis in the silence, and we can, too. In silence, the beauty of the Holy One dwells.”

Preacher and teacher Barbara Brown Taylor wrote, “The last place we look for the holy is right under our feet.”

“We can’t see the red ‘X’ because we are standing on it,” Sparks said.

Sparks told a story of a custodian in a New York City church who set up the nativity scene for Christmas and left for lunch.

When he returned, he found a baby, still with its umbilical cord, wrapped in purple towels and in the manger. Video surveillance showed a single teenage mother in a dollar store nearby buying the towels.

“The church named him Emmanuel, God with us,” Sparks said.

The Holy One “is in us, with us, for us,” Sparks said.

“This is what we are going to talk about all week: the hope that lifts us up, the peace that brings reconciliation, the love that acts on faith and joy, the one thing that might truly change the world,” she said.

The noise in the barnyard is not the end of the story.

“At the height of the chaos, a baby cries and all turn toward the manger,” Sparks said. “Nothing needs to be said; out of the chaos the Prince of Peace is born. The angel said, ‘Unto all of you is born a Savior, Christ the Lord.’ And the people said, ‘Amen.’ ”

The Rt. Rev. V. Gene Robinson, vice president of religion and senior pastor, presided. Lisa Gierszal, executive assistant in the Department of Performing and Visual Arts and project manager for Chautauqua Arts Education, read the Scriptures. Jared Jacobsen, organist and coordinator of worship and sacred music, directed the Chautauqua Choir. Willie LaFavor, piano, Rebecca Kemper Scarnati, oboe, and Orin Jacobs, bassoon, played Trio for piano, oboe and bassoon, FP 43, “ii. Andante con moto,” by Francis Poulenc for the meditation after the morning prayers. For the offertory, the Chautauqua Choir sang “Angels We have Heard On High,” arranged by Mack Wilberg. The organ postlude was Toccata in F, S.540, by Johann Sebastian Bach. The Harold F. Reed Sr. Chaplaincy and the J. Everett Hall Memorial Chaplaincy provide support for this week’s services.

For dancers, familiarity is key — familiarity with the movement, with her pointe shoes, with his physicality, with their partner; for Chautauqua School of Dance alumni, there’s an extra edge to being on the grounds — familiarity with their surroundings.

At 8:15 p.m. tonight, July 29, eight alumni will return to the Amphitheater stage — though now updated and modernized — for the Alumni Dance Gala, encoring their summers spent training as pre-professionals, for some, decades removed.

The returners have all had fruitful careers since leaving the Carnahan-Jackson Dance Studios: 2006 alumna Jacqueline Green is with Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater; 2008 alumnus David Morse is with Cincinnati Ballet; and 2004 alumna Anna Gerberich is with Joffrey Ballet. Three of the night’s dancers are 2010 alumni: Angelica Generosa with Pacific Northwest Ballet, Jordan Leeper with Atlanta Ballet and Peter Leo Walker with Aspen Santa Fe Ballet.

“There’s a lot of nostalgia,” said Leeper, who grew up in Jamestown. “I’m excited for (Chautauquans) to see my growth since the six years I’ve been absent from the Amphitheater stage.”

Green, along with guest artist and former-Ailey dancer Antonio Douthit-Boyd, will present two Ailey masterpieces: “Masekela Langage,” which draws parallels between apartheid and race-induced violence in Chicago, and the “Fix Me Jesus” pas de deux from “Revelations.”

Morse will be performing his own work titled “A Short Ride in a Fast Machine,” set to John Adams’ orchestral score of the same name. The quick-paced pas de deux is a “virtuosic, contemporary vision of a Don Quixote or a Swan Lake,” according to the School of Dance’s Director of Contemporary Studies Sasha Janes.

Morse, of Cincinnati, will be performing with his wife and Cincinnati Ballet company member Christina LaForgia Morse.

“It’s nice to have the alumni, but it’s also nice to sprinkle in some guests,” Janes said. “And sometimes you just have to because you don’t have the rehearsal time, so they need to bring repertoire they already know.”

Chautauqua “superstars” — in the words of Deborah Sunya Moore, vice president of performing and visual arts — Gerberich and Walker will present School of Dance faculty member Mark Diamond’s “Spartucus,” the story of the escaped gladiator slave who revolted against the Roman Empire.

“Spartucus” last graced the Amp stage in 2016, staged by Charlotte Ballet, and although this is the third rendition of the Alumni Dance Gala, it is the first time Diamond will render a work for the gala.

Two of Janes’ works are also on the bill: “Sketches from Grace” and a segment from a larger ballet he choreographed for Richmond Ballet. Leeper, of Atlanta, premiered “Sketches from Grace” and will perform it again tonight.

Leeper and peer Generosa will mount Tarantella, a witty and electric 1964-work by American ballet virtuoso George Balanchine. Leeper and Generosa are being coached by School of Dance director of ballet studies and master teacher and Balanchine’s contemporary, Patricia McBride. McBride danced in the original cast of Tarantella.

“(This) might be the most exciting thing we do in the dance program,” Moore said.

Additionally, Janes alluded to including School of Dance Festival and Apprentice dancers in the night’s production, likely segments from the week’s prior “Nutcracker in July” showcase.

“I really like to present not just the current dancers and alumni, but the future dancers as well,” Janes said. “It’s always a nice tie-in to have that.”

The Chautauqua Dance Circle will host a dance preview with select alumni and Janes at 7 p.m. tonight in Smith Wilkes Hall before the gala, and will host “Inside Chautauqua Dance Studios” at 3 p.m. Tuesday in the Carnahan-Jackson Dance Studios.

For Week Five’s Interfaith Friday in the Hall of Philosophy, the Rt. Rev. V. Gene Robinson, vice president of religion and senior pastor, posed a series of questions to Philip Gulley, who spoke on behalf of Quakerism.

Gulley is a writer, Quaker pastor and speaker. He received his Master of Divinity from Christian Theological Seminary, and has written over 22 books. His book, I Love You, Miss Huddleston: And Other Inappropriate Longings of My Indiana Childhood, was a finalist for the Thurber Prize for American Humor. His best-selling titles include the Harmony fiction series, the Porch Talk series of inspirational essays and If Grace is True, co-written by James Mulholland.

What follows is an abridged version of Gulley’s conversation. Gulley and Robinson’s remarks have been condensed for clarity.

Robinson: You describe a humankind that has agency. That’s a high and empowering view of humankind. Isn’t there some inevitability of justice in it? It sounded very hopeful.

Gulley: The transcendentalist and Unitarian preacher, Theodore Parker, said, “Look at the facts of the world. You see a continual and progressive triumph of the good. I do not pretend to understand the moral universe.” He said, “The arc is a long one. My eye reaches, but little ways. I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of side; I can divine it by conscience. From what I see, I am sure it bends toward justice.”

Nearly a century later, Martin Luther King Jr. would paraphrase that quote in a sermon at Temple Israel of Hollywood, when he said famously, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” And I say to you today, don’t be so sure. … The myth of the inevitability of justice simply isn’t true. We want to believe the only thing keeping us from a more perfect union is time. We want to believe militant ignorance, small-mindedness and evil, will gradually recede and one morning, the sun will rise on a more enlightened, just and noble world, but there is nothing inevitable about justice. No divine hand bending the moral arc one way or another. It is up to us, up to you and me.

So I believe in the possibility of justice. I do not believe in the inevitability of justice.

I am hopeful, but what buoys my hope is the things that trouble us that we seem to be concerned about, issues that we simply weren’t concerned about when I was born 58 years ago. So, I think that there does often seem to be a higher consciousness at work. Where I disagree with them is its inevitability. We know from studying history that societies, which have been good, can turn very quickly in times of economic peril, in times of great fear. Everything we’ve learned that has been passed down to our ancestors can be forgotten in a moment.

Is there anything left of the apocalypticism that was a part of the founding of the Quakers?

There might be amongst some Quakers that belief in the apocalyptic system, but it isn’t something that most Quakers I know dwell on. It certainly is not a driving force among most Quakers. I know if I were to announce from the pulpit this Sunday that I was giving a 10-week series on the return of Jesus, the next Sunday, the meeting house would be empty. There just isn’t this burning inquisitiveness.

Some (Quakers) consider themselves Christians, others don’t. You mentioned agnostics or possibly atheists, too. How does that work in the Quaker faith, or in a Quaker meeting where you have all of those and more represented?

Very precariously. It does seem to help that one quality most Quakers I know possess is this radical commitment to the freedom of conscience and not insisting that someone believe it just because we do. So, there is real liberty in most Quaker meetings to approach ultimate reality through their own lens, letting others approach this through their own lens, through their own life, through their own experience and reason as opposed to saying, “No, this is how God is experienced. This is what truth is.”

That sounds amazingly mature. How did the Quakers get there?

I don’t know, because we didn’t start out that way. For a good part of our history, (there is) what is called “read out of meeting,” those whom we perceived as having a theological difference, those married out of meeting, those who didn’t meet our dress codes, were all read out of meeting, and therefore, we went from being the third-largest religion in America at one time to being kind of a sectarian little number of folks who eventually, thankfully, before we all died off, got over it.

How often, in a Quaker meeting when someone speaks, is it about a theological question, and how do you know that particular sharing is of the spirit?

Most of the talking and sharing that I hear in a Quaker meeting is informed by a theological conviction, though the concern itself most often is about some social matter that we need to address or that we might not have been aware of that we need to consider and reflect upon. So, while it may not seem overtly theological, it is when you begin to parse it apart. You realize it’s informed and inspired by certain theological convictions.

Am I right to say, when someone shares something in a meeting, no one overtly disagrees and, while someone may stand and speak on behalf of themselves, they won’t attempt to correct someone who’s just spoken?

About the closest Quakers ever get to that — to calling into question the leading of another person — happens most often in our meeting for business and most often around nominations of persons to fill certain ministries or tasks within the meeting. Then, someone — for instance — might feel led to stand up and suggest a name for a position. About the only pushback you might see is another friend standing up and saying, ‘That name would not have occurred to me.’ That’s pretty gentle. So, it tends to be kind of a gentle encouragement to reflect a bit further.

So, how does someone get called to be a Quaker pastor? Who discerns if somebody says, “Yeah, I want to be one.” How does that process work?

Persons who stand up and say, “I’m called to ministry,” among friends are generally looked at skeptically by other friends. It is the community that observes the gifts for ministry and then makes it financially possible for that person to study, have time to reflect and then begin tending to the business of ministry. It was a woman who approached me when I was 21, and said, “Philip, we need Quaker pastors. I think you are gifted. You need to consider that.” And so I quit my job. I went to college, and then I went to graduate school and I returned to that same Quaker meeting to give my first sermon, and that woman came up to me afterwards and said, “Philip, perhaps I was mistaken.”

If you go to a neighboring meeting, are you a pastor there too?

I am if they call me there in that role. It is not an automatic thing. The other thing about being a Quaker pastor is that the position itself never carries with it any authority. Even if you go as a pastor, you are still expected over time to show evidence of wisdom or insight. And, as your new community experiences that, then you are gradually given the opportunity to lead.

You may be interested to know that we had a play here called The Christians. It’s about a megachurch pastor who determines that he doesn’t believe in hell anymore, and what happens as a result. And it’s not pretty. You’re not surprised by that?

When word got out that I didn’t believe in hell and that I was in fact a Universalist, an effort began among conservative Quakers to strip me of what friends call a “recording,” or a member equivalent of an ordination. That went on for eight years. For eight summers, I had to sit and listen as people questioned my birth. It was, at times, painful and, at other times, very liberating because I had worked very hard to become a recorded pastor with the education and the time invested, but ultimately when it began, I thought to myself, “Oh, there’s nothing worse that could happen to me than to lose my pastoral standing, my vocation that I love.” And then, in time, I realized that there were many things a lot worse than that. And, it helped that my own local meeting was very supportive of me and stood with me for those eight years.

As young Chautauquans warmed up their voices, the spirit of friendly competition filled Boys’ and Girls’ Club on Friday for Chautauqua Opera Company’s Opera Invasion: “So You Think You’re Louder Than an Opera Singer?”

After kids learned their musical phrases, the loudest singers from each group went to the front of the hall. One of the chosen, Gabriel O’Brien, 15, geared up for his excerpt.

It wasn’t O’Brien’s opera debut. He was one of the winners from last year’s Invasion and was incredulous that he won again. O’Brien said he loves music in general, especially after learning about it in elementary school.

“I thought it was interesting,” O’Brien said. “For it being my second year having won in a row, I just didn’t expect it — to win twice, that is.”

For 8-year-old Max Kirvan, winning the competition with his peers was exhilarating.

“I really like to sing,” Kirvan said. “I think it’s so fun to congratulate the people — and win.”

Four students from the Chautauqua School of Music Voice Program — soprano Lydia Grace Graham, mezzo-soprano Gal Kohav, tenor Mathieu Levan and bass Brandon Mecklenburg — joined Steven Osgood, Chautauqua Opera Company’s general and artistic director, to teach kids about opera. From the two 45-minute sessions with kids from different age groups, five other young Chautauquans won, along with O’Brien and Kirvan — Victoria Murillo, Ada Oncken, Michael Sammarco, Bella Rosa and Phoebe Hillstrom.

All the winners will be featured in the Chautauqua Symphony Orchestra’s “Opera Pops” concert at 8:15 p.m. Saturday in the Amphitheater.

For winner Murillo, this Opera Invasion aligned with her desires perfectly — to both yell and sing.

“When I was singing, I really just wanted to yell,” she said. “But I want to be a singer when I grow up.”

A first-time Chautauquan in the audience, Piper Gunnarson said this was a great way to approach music education. She works for the New York City-based On Site Opera, an opera company that specializes in site-specific productions, with Chautauqua Opera’s ¡Figaro! (90210) Director Eric Einhorn. Gunnarson said Osgood and the singers succeeded in introducing specific musical terms to young Chautauquans.

“I think this is an excellent idea,” Gunnarson said. “Opera is a really complex art form and the most important thing, I think, is to not talk down to kids when you are teaching them.”

The kids relished in both performing and watching their friends sing until the last winner was called.

With his winner’s T-shirt in hand, Kirvan said he was excited about winning the competition. But there was one thing he wanted Chautuaquans to know.

“And also, I do karate,” Kirvan said.

“This is a singing mosquito, and it’s going to sing the ‘12th Street Rag,’ ” Tom Smothers told his brother, Dick. “I know everybody kills mosquitoes. That’s why not very many of them make it in show business.”

Tom Smothers then opened a glass vial and released the singing mosquito, which he described as “a show business first.” After a few lines of “12th Street Rag,” applause filled the studio and small television screens nationwide. After joining in the applause, Dick Smothers opened his hands — he had squashed the imaginary singing mosquito.

The bit opened the fifth episode of the first season of Emmy Award-winning “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour,” in 1967. After three seasons on CBS, filling the same time slot as NBC’s “Bonanza,” and later “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In,” the CBS network canceled the folk-singing comedy act in 1969, claiming the Smothers Brothers violated their show’s contract with the network. Thus, the wildly popular sibling duo was squashed — but not for long.

April marked the 50th anniversary of the cancellation that launched popular television audiences and media professionals into a decades-long, ongoing reevaluation of free speech and political satire.

Opening Week Six, “What’s Funny? In Partnership with the National Comedy Center,” Tom and Dick Smothers, who over the years have performed at Chautauqua and the Lucille Ball Comedy Festival in Jamestown, will be joined by David Bianculli at 10:45 a.m. today, July 29, in the Amphitheater. Bianculli, television critic for NPR’s “Fresh Air” and author of Dangerously Funny: The Uncensored Story of “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour,” will interview the Smothers Brothers in a special presentation, “The Smothers Brothers Reunited: Comedy and Censorship on the 50th Anniversary of their Network TV Firing.”

“This year marks 50 years after CBS fired the Smothers Brothers, bringing their variety show to an end — a show that, through satire, protested the war, combated racism and mocked the president,” said Matt Ewalt, vice president and Emily and Richard Smucker Chair for Education. “There was intense political pressure to shut them down and a push to gain stronger governmental control over broadcast media. We’re honored to have the Smothers Brothers back at Chautauqua to mark this moment, reflect on the role of satire in our culture and democracy, and to spark a larger conversation on these grounds about free speech and speaking truth to power.” 

After being canceled, which Tom Smothers later described as being “fired,” the Smothers Brothers filed a suit against CBS in the U.S. District Court in California — Tom Smothers et al. v. Columbia Broadcasting System, Inc. The court found CBS to be in violation of its contract with the Smothers Brothers — not the other way around. In a counter suit, CBS claimed “the entertainers had violated their contracts when they did not deliver programs that conformed to CBS practices and standards,” The New York Times reported on April 7, 1973.

“By becoming unexpected martyrs to the cause of free speech, the Smothers Brothers lost their most influential national TV platform just when that freedom mattered the most,”  Bianculli wrote in Dangerously Funny.

Born on Governors Island, New York, in 1937 and 1939, respectively, Tom and Dick Smothers moved to California with their family, where they graduated high school and attended San Jose State College. They began their comedy careers on the Purple Onion stage in San Francisco, singing folk songs — Tom on guitar and Dick on stand-up bass — and telling sibling jokes.

But their professional routines evolved, and they eventually appeared on late night programs and their famed “Comedy Hour,” satirizing the U.S. government in protest of the Vietnam War, and, as Bianculli puts it, as a way of engaging “the generational, artistic, and moral duels being fought in the ’60s.” After the show’s cancellation, the Smothers Brothers performed across the country, at festivals and on Broadway, until they announced their public performance retirement in 2010.

“Year to year, the shows said it all: Tom and Dick Smothers looked different, acted differently, and protested more brazenly and passionately,” Bianculli wrote in Dangerously Funny. “What they managed to say and do was important, and what they were prevented from saying and doing was no less meaningful.”

Clubbers a taste of opera Friday during the Annual “So You Think You’re Louder Than an Opera Singer?” Opera Invasion at Chautauqua Boy’s and Girl’s Club. After learning about opera and musical devices from Voice Program students and Chautauqua Opera general and artistic director Steven Osgood, children were taught lines from The Ghosts of Versailles which they sang as loudly as they could to determine who among them might really be louder than an opera singer.

Video by Mhari Shaw.

School of Music students will put on yet another eclectic mix of instrumental and vocal pieces this weekend.

The third of five student open recitals will take place at 2 p.m. Sunday, July 28 in McKnight Hall. It is the midway point of the open recital series, and gives students another opportunity to perform pieces they’ve been working on in a public setting and connect with the Chautauqua community. Six students will be performing in Sunday’s recital: cellist Shiye Li, flutist Ji Yun Yi, pianist Daniel Kuehler, mezzo-soprano Erin Wagner, pianist Yue Zhang and soprano Shan Hai.

At these open recitals, students can play or sing whatever piece they like, meaning that each performance is a diverse mix of preferences and styles. For example, Wagner will be singing a piece from beyond the usual vocal repertoire: “Harawi (Songs of Love and Death)” by Olivier Messiaen.

The piece is a song cycle that is part of the “Tristan Trilogy.” This particular part of the trilogy compares a story of two lovers in Incan mythology to the story of Tristan and Isolde. It explores the divinity of God, nature and forbidden love.

It is surrealist, conceptual, atonal and rhythmically irregular. It also features some lyrics in Quechuan, an indigenous Peruvian language.

“Musically, it is very difficult to put together,” Wagner said. “It’s very hard to maintain the stillness and the calmness while in your head you’re counting and making sure that you’re singing the right intervals and the right words, and at the same time being musical and telling the story.”

Joining this piece on the program are several pieces by Claude Debussy: One for flute — his famous “Prélude à l’après midi d’un faune” (Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun), to be performed by Yi — and one for piano, a particularly technically challenging piece called “Étude 11: Pour les arpèges composés” (For the compound arpeggios) to be played by Zhang. Zhang will also play one of Franz Liszt’s most famous works, “La Campanella.”

Li will perform Luigi Boccherini’s Cello Sonata in A Major G.4; Keuhler will play Alexander Scriabin’s Fantasie in B Minor, Op. 28; and Hai will sing two arias from two different operas: “Piangero” from George Frideric Handel’s Giulio Cesare and “Quel Guardo Il Cavaliere” from Gaetano Donizetti’s Don Pasquale.

The open recitals are some of the few opportunities that students from all three programs in the School of Music get the chance to perform at the same event.

“We can all learn from each other because music is what connects all of us, and I think that it’s very interesting to watch other musicians perform and hear what they have to say, musically,” Wagner said.

As the Chautauqua season moves into Week Six, School of Music students are facing only two weeks left in their programs — one week, in the case of the piano students. However, there is still time for the students to learn and work on what they showcase in both the open recitals and their other performances.

“It’s a constant process,” Wagner said. “It’s never like you can stop working. … My experience has been very motivating and I feel very comfortable to explore new things musically, and it’s just been a really good place to hone my craft and develop my artistry and learn new things, and I’m looking forward to continuing that.”

This weekend, two Jons will come together for an evening of lively and varied chamber music rooted in Romanticism, jazz and ragtime.

At 4 p.m. Saturday, July 27 in Elizabeth S. Lenna Hall, clarinetist Jon Manasse and pianist Jon Nakamatsu will perform several pieces as a piano and clarinet duo, some of which were originally composed specifically for them. This is the fifth recital in the Chautauqua Chamber Music Resident Artist Series; so far this summer, this series has seen pianists play alongside string instruments and has featured several all-string ensembles — but this piano and clarinet combination will be something new.

“I think that those two instruments and the combination of their sounds really illustrate the broad vocabulary of the clarinet, and even of the piano, to a certain extent,” Nakamatsu said.

Nakamatsu and Manasse met through a mutual manager who thought they would work well together, and upon first performing together found that they clicked with each other musically in an intuitive way they had rarely found with other performers. Since then, they have played and toured together for 15 years.

“From the very first note we ever played together, it was something extraordinary for both of us,” Nakamatsu said. “I don’t think I’ve ever played with anyone, and as often, with whom I feel this type of almost uncanny common sense.”

The two attribute their ability to collaborate so well to their shared musical aesthetic and an easy communication that can be done without words and even without rehearsal.

“I guess the closest thing is some sort of telepathy,” Manasse said. “When we play together, there is some intuitive sense of each other where the musical connection is seamless. … We just sort of honor it as another entity.”

The first piece on the program is Johannes Brahms’ Clarinet Sonata No. 1 in F Minor, Op. 120. It has four movements, each of which has its own distinct mood. The first is somber, the second is reminiscent of a love song, the third has the feel of a dance piece and the fourth is upbeat and exciting.

Brahms came out of retirement to write this piece, struck by inspiration after hearing clarinetist Richard Mühlfeld play. Composed near the end of his life, the work — which is dedicated to Mühlfeld — is often rather melancholy, but it still has many moments of hope and warmth.

“(It) resonated from a really honest, deep, emotional space,” Manasse said. “It’s as true as any music could possibly be to the composer.”

Next, the duo will play Leonard Bernstein’s Sonata for Clarinet and Piano. Whereas Brahms wrote his clarinet and piano sonata at the end of his career, Bernstein wrote this one at the beginning of his; it is his very first published work. Two movements long, the piece has jazz elements and markers of Bernstein’s style that audibly foreshadow the music of West Side Story that Bernstein would write around 15 years later.

“It’s really exciting and compelling,” Manasse said. “There are emotional moments and jazzy moments.”

The Bernstein piece will be followed by two of Gordon Goodwin’s “Four Views (for clarinet and piano),” which was originally composed for Manasse and Nakamatsu. The two commissioned Goodwin, a Hollywood composer who has worked on the scores for films like “The Incredibles” and “National Treasure,” because of how imaginative and fun they found his work to be. Nakamatsu and Manasse will be playing two of the four “views” — one slow and one fast.

“They’re not named, so you’re kind of left to create your own vignette from listening to it, but they’re short and fun,” Nakamatsu said.

To finish the recital, the two will play another commissioned piece by John Novacek, called “Four Rags for Two Jons.” The rags are energetic and complex, with an improvisatory jazz sound typical of the ragtime style. The piece is a significant technical challenge to the performers, but it is also good-humored and fun.

“If everyone’s having a good time, that’s great, because we’re working really hard,” Nakamatsu said.

Both Manasse and Nakamatsu are here for a limited time as School of Music faculty, and Nakamatsu will also be giving a public piano master class to Piano Program students at 2 p.m. Monday in Sherwood-Marsh Studios.

A blue whale has a heart the size of a car.

It’s a fact, but to Joshua Bennett, it’s also a metaphor for love, a love as big as a Volkswagen Beetle. A fact, a metaphor and also an example — embodying how Bennett has learned to sing what others only say.

Bennett, an NAACP Image Award nominee and assistant professor of English and creative writing at Dartmouth College, closed Week Five, “The Life of the Spoken Word,” at 10:45 a.m. Friday in the Amphitheater. A majority of Bennett’s lecture was delivered in an extended question and answer period, but before that, he performed five of his poems.

Bennett wrestled with how to deliver his lecture, but decided that eccentric, theatrical interpretations of his poems would do their messages more justice than anything else.

“To me, it matters when you see a flesh-and-blood person before you, because it’s almost a reminder of what’s possible,” said Bennett, author of Algorithm and Blues, The Sobbing School and three forthcoming works: Owed, Being Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of Man and Spoken Word: A Cultural History. “This is ancient; what we’re doing here. This is the oldest tradition in the Western world, this oral poetry. The ancient Greek poems taught in school, they began as performances. I don’t think we’ve ever lost that, but I think we need to recover that memory.”

Bennett’s poems serve as an outline of his journey, not just as a spoken word artist, but also as an educator. His career did not begin in formal institutions like the places he performs now, but instead, bloomed in middle-school cafeterias in the South Bronx and in his parents’ dining room, where he would perform church sermons starting at just 4 years old.

“My family, in all their kindness, would listen, and that taught me something as a very small boy, which is that words have power,” Bennett said. “Whatever the power was that happened on Sunday mornings that had people cartwheeling, running and laughing and crying, I knew that I wanted that and the spoken word became part of my way of capturing that.”

The first poem he performed was “Say it, Sing it if the Spirit Leads,” which he wrote in the summer of 2012 for the very first class he ever taught, a class of nine elementary school students whom he urged to love their blackness, for “their beauty is not a burden.”

“Say it / That every single day is a toast to living / an ode to the way we make survival an art. / My classroom is a self-love anthem in nine parts. / Together we unlove shame, we dream silly, we sing what we cannot say anywhere else. … We will honor the dead / praise what they left behind / No one can make us afraid of being alive. / My people stay alive, they always have. / Say ‘always have.’ / Say ‘always will.’ ”

@SirJoshBennett started off by reciting a poem. He said the best way to show spoken word, would be to give us examples of spoken word. #CHQ2019 pic.twitter.com/yqHXAtbCQw

— The Chautauquan Daily (@chqdaily) July 26, 2019

Long before he wrote that poem, he was a student at the University of Pennsylvania. Before Bennett could graduate, he had to conquer his science credit requirement, and since Moby Dick was his favorite novel and Jonah and Noah were his “guys,” he figured oceanography would suffice.

Bennett doesn’t remember anything from that oceanography class, other than the fact that blue whales have car-sized hearts.

“What I knew, even as a 21-year-old who was in serious fear of not graduating, was that I one day wanted to give someone a love that big,” he said.

Thus, his poem “Balaenoptera” was born.

“And maybe, if you asked me to, I would crawl through the veins of a blue whale on my hands and knees, photograph that Volkswagen-sized heart of hers and place the picture on your pillow before you went to sleep,” Bennett recited. “When you ask me about it, I’ll probably just laugh, giggling, like I’ve got a handful of diamonds in my throat and say, ‘See, I told you / the biggest heartbeat God ever made, and now, it’s all yours.’ ”

As Bennett continued to write and improve, more opportunities came his way outside of the classroom, like when he was invited to perform at the White House Poetry Jam in 2009. Bennett’s mother came to the White House with him and — with the best of intentions — she pushed Secret Service out of the way to meet Michelle Obama, telling her she taught Bennett everything he knows. Bennett wouldn’t attribute his talent to her, but does give her credit for his ability to use it.

“I don’t get it from her,” he said. “She’s not a poet, but she is incredible and she raised me to believe in my voice and the power of what language can do.”

Alongside his mother, Bennett’s greatest inspirations were his teachers. One in particular is Ms. Simms, who “transformed” his life.

“Ms. Simms saw me; she saw a ton of potential and she invested a lot of her time,” he said. “Whenever I step in front of my lecture hall in Dartmouth, I think about her, and I think about every teacher that saw a kid that didn’t have a great shot at the beginning, believed I could be whatever I wanted, told me so to my face and followed through.”

In her honor, Bennett performed, for the first time, “Owed to the 10th Grade English Teacher.”

“Of course, you were not my mother. / But you were fashioned from the same star-shined fabric as she / and you wore your historical brilliance that way,” he said. “Ms. Simms, first of her name, breaker of generational curses and systemic self-doubt, lover of Motown, advocate of boys and girls hailing from the underground of this world of access and wealth / those of us who are not supposed to be anywhere near the great American canyon … in spite of it all, you dared to call us possible. / And so we were.”

Through teaching at Dartmouth, Bennett has become a mentor himself, but creating poetry is a very different process for students now than it was when he was growing up. According to him, his students are more “cautious and judicious” about the things they say, given how the internet documents their lives in a way they can’t escape from.

Bennett sees where his students are coming from, but thinks living in that fear is holding them back.

“If you want to talk, you should talk,” he said. “You have to be courageous in our speech, we have to take care of each other and we have to forgive each other too as a fundamental principle. I was away from the church for a long time, but what I could never relinquish was this basic principle of mercy. Mercy is the goodness we don’t deserve.”

“Every poem I write, I want it to feel like a conversation… I also wanted to have the music of those first preachers I heard…” – Bennett #CHQ2019

— The Chautauquan Daily (@chqdaily) July 26, 2019

In addition to being more cautious, Bennett said college students are also more “well-read” and invested in creating social change than ever before.

“College students, I think, are really misrepresented right now in the public sphere,” he said. “In office hours, my students have questions about their moral compass: ‘How can I be a decent person?’ ‘How can books help me do that?’ They don’t ask about their GPAs; they want to know how to make the world better, and that’s what a university is supposed to be for.”

Like his Dartmouth students, Bennett had questions of his own as a student at Princeton University. When he graduated from Princeton, he was shocked by the way people used the language of diversity and inclusion “to not see each other.”

“I would go to give a job talk or a lecture and people would say, ‘Oh, are you the new diversity hire?’ and I would say, ‘No, I’m Joshua, actually,’ ” he said.

To exemplify human difference, Bennett performed “Token Sings the Blues.”

“You contain multitudes and are yet contained everywhere you go / confined like there is always someone watching you / And isn’t there?” he spoke. “And isn’t that the entire point of the flesh you inherited? / This unrepentant stain? / ‘Be twice as good,’ mama says, as if what they have is worth your panic, worth measuring your very life against / And you always remember to measure.”

Bennett’s next poem was an ode to his father, a man born in “Jim Crow Alabama” who grew up in the shrapnel of American history. He desegregated his high school and served in the Vietnam War, never considering himself the hero of his life’s stories. In fact, loneliness was his principal emotion.

To paint a picture of optimism in the midst of survival, Bennett performed “America Will Be.”

“He witnessed firsthand the firebombs / the Klan and multiple messiahs,” he recited. “Love soaked and shot through / somehow still believes in this grand blood-stained / experiment till votes still prays that his children might / make a life unlike any he has ever seen. He looks / at me like the promise of another cosmos and I never / know what to tell him. / All of the books in my head have made me cynical and distant, but there’s a choir / in him that calls me forward …”

Throughout his life, Bennett believes he inherited some of his father’s optimism and attributes maintaining that positive outlook to his students.   

“Who will tell the children there’s no hope?” he said. “They are already running toward hope every single day. So, I believe in the future because I believe in us, I believe in our collective capacity to make things different. I am the product of that truth.”

In addition to his parents and teachers, Bennett takes inspiration from an ever-growing list of poets who came before him, such as Sunni Patterson, Amiri Baraka and Gwendolyn Brooks.

“(Brooks was) not just an orator and writer but someone who believed that her poems could go anywhere,” he said. “She was a Pulitzer Prize winner who would teach poetry workshops in the basement of a church, so she’s an inspiration to me to take poems wherever people are.”

Above all, taking poems “wherever people are” requires Bennett to communicate to his audience with care — and always truthfully.

“I try to remind myself every time I step on the page that I have an ethical demand upon my life to be honest,” he said. “I try to say no matter what, no matter how this audience receives what I’m about to say, I owe it to them and I owe it to myself to come with the whole portrait of who I am; that way if it’s accepted, or it’s rejected, it’s on my own terms.”

“I don’t know how to define poetry in a sense, but if I hear something and I feel it, it’s a poem.” – Bennett #CHQ2019

— The Chautauquan Daily (@chqdaily) July 26, 2019

Students from New York State Summer School of the Arts School of Choral Studies have been coming to Chautauqua Institution to perform for as long as Jared Berry can remember. But according to Berry, NYSSSA assistant director for administration, every performance is a “brand new experience” for him and the audience. 

The group’s performance at the Institution will take place at 2:30 p.m. Sunday, July 28 in the Amphitheater. This year, there are just under 60 students in the four-week choral studies program from all over New York State, ranging from high school freshmen to rising college freshmen.

“It’s a real wide array, perhaps the most geographically diverse group I have seen in my time here at NYSSSA,” Berry said. “That is really important to us, because they all bring different strengths to the overall performance.”

To be selected for the program, students must complete a “rigorous” application and audition process. Even though it’s selective, Berry said students on “all technical levels” are accepted. 

“We are looking for students who will grow no matter what level they are at now,” he said. “We’ve had students come for one summer and it be life-changing for them, but we have also had returners who have come for as many as five summers straight. They continue to come back, learn and apply their techniques over and over again.”

The students are engaged six days a week through choir rehearsals, ensemble meetings, seminars and private lessons. The Amp performance always kicks off the last week of the program, which is why Berry thinks Chautauqua is the perfect opportunity to see all of the students’ work come together.

“This is one of the highlights of our summer every single year,” he said. “For me, to see everything we have worked for come together on that Amp stage — it’s incredible. I am always so proud of what they accomplish in such a small amount of time.” 

This year, under the artistic direction of Hugh Ferguson Floyd, the students will perform a “varied repertoire,” including classical pieces, songs in different languages and music from modern composers. According to Berry, the students have never repeated a piece at a Chautauqua performance.

“We have classical pieces selected by composers like Mozart, but we will also perform gospel music and more current pieces as well,” he said. “We try to get the students exposed to a wide array of music history and time periods, as well as different cultures. It’s really perfect for a place as culturally rich as Chautauqua.”

Berry said the variety of music will align with Chautauqua’s intergenerational audience.

“I think there will be something for everyone to really enjoy at this concert,” he said. “There is such a wide variety of selections, that I think there will be something that appeals to everyone in the family. We have a lot of fun with it.”

Every year, Berry sees “full-circle moments.” For him, he sees alumni of NYSSSA both performing and working as part of the faculty.

But for his students, that “full-circle” moment occurs when they step onto the Amp stage.

“The students love coming back,” he said. “It’s always sort of life-changing for the students when they see professional-level opera happen on the stage and then days later, they come to perform their music that they have been preparing for weeks on that same exact stage. It’s beautiful, and we’re so excited.”

Welcome to the sixth week of our 146th Assembly. Writing these greetings to you each week gets harder and harder. Half the time I want to celebrate what we’ve just experienced in the prior week, and yet there is so much more ahead to celebrate. So please indulge me as I do a little of both.

Starting Thursday night, we launched our first-ever three-day Opera Festival. I am often in awe of Chautauqua Opera Company General and Artistic Director Steven Osgood, and this weekend is just one more example. To pull off three operas back-to-back, in facilities that have other uses and using crew and staff that have other duties, is simply remarkable. To do so with such grace and talent is sublime. It has been an honor to welcome the many who have traveled to Chautauqua just for this. I’m so proud of Chautauqua Opera Company and Steve. Bravo!

One of my favorite events all season is when 5-year-olds from our Children’s School march to the President’s Cottage to present me with their ideas of what might make a better Chautauqua. It’s a tradition we started when I first arrived, and there simply is no better way to feel good about the world than to visit with these little ones. Here are some highlights from this year’s list of ideas:

A few things (they) love about Chautauqua are:

-Sunny days and shining water

-Riding our bikes

-ICE CREAM

-And, of course, … Children’s School!

Here are some ideas for potential improvements:

-More BATS and BUTTERFLIES and BEES!

-A house that looks like a donut and sells donuts

-Give more hugs to everyone

-A spaceship to travel around Chautauqua in

-Plant more trees so we have more oxygen

It has been a little hot this summer, so here are a few specific lake suggestions:

-Find diamonds in the water and turn them into fish

-Submarine in the lake

-Roller coaster in the lake

-A giant, pizza-eating shark that lives in the lake

This is just a sampling. I’m keeping the rest for our top-secret research and development files, but I thank this wonderful group of young people for their love of Chautauqua.

Now on to this week, where we explore “What’s Funny?” with the National Comedy Center. We’re excited to partner with our neighbors and friends at the National Comedy Center for the second time — this week, they celebrate the one-year anniversary of the opening of their incredible facility and experience in Jamestown. We hope you’ve come to learn and laugh with us, as we embark upon a week exploring how comedy changes us and, in turn, society. Comedy can do more than hold up a mirror to our world; it can, in fact, change it. We’ll look at the potential of comedy — particularly political comedy — to change minds and influence decision-making. Among the topics to explore are: What does your sense of humor reveal about you? How can we be challenged by things we don’t find funny? We’ll look at the challenging intersection of free speech, political correctness and humor, and what we can learn from that uncomfortable space.

In our companion Interfaith Lecture Series, we ask “What’s So Funny About Religion?” Even religion can have its less serious side, and during this week we will look for a lighter, smiling way to lift one’s heart and mind in the human enterprise that tends to take life and its meaning and purpose very seriously. Building upon our 2018 week on “The Spirituality of Play,” we will use words to play and to discover that seeing the humorous side of religion is a delightful way of joyfully leading the human to the divine. Be prepared to smile.

I have to say, I’m so excited to personally share the stage this week with actor, producer and director Frank Oz, who, one fan has posited, might be responsible for generating more joy than anyone on Earth. His film and TV credits are many, legendary and continuing — I first fell in love with his work on the Muppets. What a dream for a kid and a kid at heart.

His artistry has had a lasting impact on millions, including me — what a profound legacy.

For those who have been with us the whole season, Week Six is the perfect moment to “lighten up” and laugh in our shared journey. For those just joining us, we’re excited that you’re bringing your own sense of humor to our shared community. For those who can just pop in and out, we know you’ll laugh extra hard to make up for it.

I’m so grateful to have this community to share the laughter. As Milton Berle famously said, “Laughter is an instant vacation!” … or Week Six at Chautauqua!

-Michael E. Hill

A celebration honoring something as grandiose as 90 consecutive years of opera requires a production that is just as extravagant.

As the final opera in Chautauqua Opera Company’s three-day festival of the Beaumarchais Trilogy, The Ghosts of Versailles — with John Corigliano’s music and William Hoffman’s libretto — pulls audiences into different realities and emotions, with the characters they’ve come to know throughout Il Barbiere di Siviglia and ¡Figaro! (90210). The Ghosts of Versailles is a grand opera buffa, incorporating  both comedy and grandiose opera songs.

At 8:15 p.m. Saturday, July 27 in the Amphitheater, the story returns to the stage, as Chautauqua Opera performs The Ghosts of Versailles, bringing Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais’ Figaro Trilogy Weekend at Chautauqua to a close. This performance is also in celebration of Corigliano’s 80th birthday year. He will be in the audience on Saturday.

The Ghosts of Versailles Stage Director Peter Kazaras said, between the comical moments and memorable characters, the piece gives sincere insight into grief and loss.

“The things about this opera, and this is why it was a great opera for the Met and Chautauqua, is that you can take away lots of things,” Kazaras said. “You can take it as ‘funny Figaro’ or as a profound meditation on loss and grief — there’s lots of different ways you can feel about the piece.”

Kazaras  fell in love with opera at a young age, and has a special history with The Ghosts of Versailles..

He didn’t choose a bouncy castle or a pool party for his 10th birthday. Instead, he chose to see the opera Boris Godunov by Modest Mussorgsky at New York’s Metropolitan Opera.

“It’s in my DNA,” Kazaras said. “My father was a singer and my mother was a musicologist, and they spent my entire childhood telling me not to be a professional musician, and I said ‘I don’t know if I believe that.’ ”

Years later, Kazaras made his Metropolitan Opera debut in that very same Mussorgsky opera. Then in 1991, Kazaras graced the Met stage as Count Almaviva in the world premiere of John Corigliano’s The Ghosts of Versailles.

“It was totally exciting,” Kazaras said. “It was a big performance — it took seven weeks of rehearsal, which is unheard of.”

Corigliano’s The Ghosts of Versailles is loosely based on the final story in Beaumarchais’ Figaro trilogy — La Mère coupable (The Guilty Mother).   

The Ghosts of Versailles is a complicated piece, according to Steven Osgood, general and artistic director of Chautauqua Opera. 

“But it does everything that we want in an operatic treatment of The Guilty Mother,” Osgood said.

The Characters

The story takes place in the afterlife of King Louis XVI, who is played by baritone Guest Artist Marco Nisticò. The ghost of Louis XVI’s wife, Queen Marie Antoinette, played by soprano Guest Artist Caitlin Lynch, is upset about being beheaded. To cheer her up, the ghost of Beaumarchais, played by baritone Guest Artist Daniel Belcher, stages an opera called A Figaro for Antonia, which is based on La Mère coupable.

The opera within the opera, A Figaro for Antonia, brings together Count Almaviva, played by Young Artist Blake Friedman, tenor, and Countess Rosine, played by Young Artist Lauren Yokabaskas, soprano. The two characters have run into marital issues; the count is estranged from Rosine after finding out she was unfaithful.

Their son León, who is played by Young Artist James Stevens, tenor, is the product of the infidelity and is in love with the Count’s illegitimate daughter, Florestine — played by Young Artist Natalie Trumm, soprano.

Figaro, played by baritone Young Artist Scott Purcell, and Susanna, played by mezzo-soprano Young Artist Quinn Middleman, come to the rescue. The story comes 20 years after Beaumarchais’ Le Mariage de Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro).

A Play Within a Play

In A Figaro for Antonia, Beaumarchais inserts himself into the story in an attempt to rescue Marie Antoinette from the French Revolution. During the revolution in 1793, Marie Antoinette was executed by guillotine after a trial found her guilty of high treason.

Kazaras said, to him, this is an emotional story about Marie Antoinette, as she attempts to move through her pain — particularly the pain she experienced toward the end of her life — and fall in love.

“It follows the story of The Guilty Mother, but then it includes all this stuff about Beaumarchais and Marie, which is separate,” Kazaras said. “And that, interestingly, ends up being the heart of the piece.”

Belcher played Figaro in Chautauqua Opera’s Il Barbiere di Siviglia, both earlier this season and on Thursday. For Belcher, playing Beaumarchais in The Ghosts of Versailles represents a departure — of sorts.

“Beaumarchais is Figaro, and Figaro is Beaumarchais,” Belcher said. “At the end of the opera, Beaumarchais says, ‘Goodbye Figaro, take care and safe journey — you were my favorite child.’ ”

Amid Figaro’s witty antics and the blossoming love between certain characters, Marie Antoinette endeavours to be free of her trauma. Lynch said even though Marie Antoinette is a significant historical figure, she found the queen to be more human than people think.

“Through the telling of this story, she’s a ghost, but we see her as more human,” Lynch said. “If you just come at this character from the inside, from her heart, then she’s not as daunting — at least that’s how I’ve approached it.”

‘Settling Scores’

Once Le Mariage de Figaro was performed in 1784, Beaumarchais had already begun to write La Mère coupable. Despite Beaumarchais’ successes — especially after Le Mariage de Figaro — he met many failures. Osgood said La Mère was written in a tumultuous time for Beaumarchais.

“It’s a problematic piece,” Osgood said. “He wrote it much later than the others, and he as a person had changed.”

In 1785, Beaumarchais was briefly jailed for criticism against those who wanted to ban Le Mariage. Beaumarchais and his lover of 12 years, Marie-Thérèse de Willer-Mawlas, were wed in 1786. But then, he fell into legal battles and feuded with a powerful French lawyer named Bergasse, who ended up being a central antagonist in La Mère.

Even after the lawyer lost the case, he tried to tarnish Beaumarchais’ public image. To the French people, the lawyer looked like a champion for justice while Beaumarchais stood in ill repute. This sets the mood for La Mère, where Beaumarchais put his pen to paper in the spirit of revenge.

Kazaras said La Mère showcased Beaumarchais’ bitterness toward the world.

“In The Guilty Mother, Beaumarchais was settling a lot of scores,” Kazaras said. “He had a lot of bad stuff going on. … He is one of the original self-made men of the world, and he was constantly making money and losing money, like Figaro — he was definitely interested in settling scores.”

The whispers of revolution in France started to become louder, turning into a full scale revolt in 1789. Beaumarchais’ loyalty to the crown was questioned, and he was excluded from his district’s revolutionary council.

In 1791, La Mère  was accepted for production by the La Comédie-Française, but Beaumarchais withdrew it when the actors refused to work due to new literary property laws. It was staged in 1792 to an “unresponsive audience,” who deemed it “unfashionably non-political,” according to Oxford World Classics’ Beaumarchais: Figaro Trilogy,  a translation by David Coward.

As he began to revise it, Beaumarchais’ life worsened. His house was ransacked by a mob, who believed he had a collection of unsold weapons. From there, he was arrested and sent to the Abbaye Prison. At the same time, Beaumarchais was involved in a scheme to buy weapons stored in Holland, otherwise known as the Dutch Guns Affair. As he traveled to Holland, his loyalties were questioned, and he fought back with a series of memoirs.

As the Dutch Gun Affair dragged on, Beaumarchais was in and out of jail, accused of profiteering and was put on a list of émigré, a list of French citizens who put themselves into political exile. The émigré required that he divorce his wife and leave France. He fled to Hamburg, Germany, where he could gather himself in peace and published a new series of self-justifying memoirs.

In 1796, he returned to France and remarried his wife. The next year, La Mère was successfully restaged. Beaumarchais dealt with more debt issues until his death in 1799.

La Mère didn’t receive an operatic version right away. In 1966, French composer Darius Milhaud was the first to complete an opera on La Mère.

“There are operas out there of The Guilty Mother that have not achieved the same repertoire status that The Barber of Seville and The Marriage of Figaro have achieved,” Osgood said.

The Ghosts of Versailles is a surreal piece of opera that will pull Chautauquans into a world of heartfelt music, Belcher said.

“(The Ghosts of Versailles) is complicated and then out comes the most sublime, beautiful, ethereal, transformative music,” Belcher said. “It’s really a love letter to Mozart, Rossini, Beaumarchais, and in many ways, Marie  Antoinette.”

The Rev. Susan Sparks is a trial lawyer turned preacher, comedian, speaker, author, nationally syndicated columnist and Harley-riding cowboy boot addict. America’s only female comedian with a pulpit returns as chaplain for Week Six — this time, bringing some Christmas cheer with her.

Sparks will preach at the 10:45 a.m. Sunday, July 28 Ecumenical Service of Worship and Sermon in the Amphitheater on the topic “It Wasn’t Exactly a Silent Night.” She will talk about her faith journey at the 5 p.m. Vespers in the Hall of Philosophy. She will preach Monday, July 29 through Friday, August 2 at the 9:15 a.m. Ecumencial Service. Among her topics will be “A Star is Born,” “The Politics of Sweet Potato Casserole,”  “What are You Getting the Baby Jesus for Christmas?,” “Healing the Humbug” and “Taking Down the Tree.” 

Her newest book, Preaching Punchlines: The Ten Commandments of Stand-up Comedy, will be launched at Chautauqua during her Preaching Punchlines workshop at 3:30 p.m. Monday, July 29 through the Special Studies program.

In Preaching Punchlines, the seventh commandment is “Thou Shalt Throw A Party.” Creating a successful church service is like planning a party — you focus on the guests.

“On the day of the party, you don’t lock the door,” Sparks wrote. “You stand there and greet the guests as they arrive. Welcome them with good food and great conversation.

After the party, share photos or emails that will encourage them to return. And throughout, “add personal touches to make your guests feel special, like they matter more than anything else. Why? Because you invited them,” she wrote.

Her other commandments are: Thou shalt remember thou art creative; thou shalt learn to write like a comedian; thou shalt get to the point — please!; thou shalt preach like an EKG, thou shalt find creative material; thou shalt not be a victim of identity theft; thou shalt not be exhausted by the Sabbath; thou shalt achieve world peace through humor and thou shalt have joyous communication.

A North Carolina native, Sparks received her Bachelor of Arts at the University of North Carolina and a law degree from Wake Forest University.

After 10 years as a lawyer moonlighting as a stand-up comedian, she left her practice and spent two years on a solo trip around the world, including working with Mother Teresa’s mission in Kolkata.

Upon returning home, she entered Union Theological Seminary in New York City, where she earned a Master of Divinity and wrote an honors thesis on humor and religion.

In May 2007, Sparks was installed as the 15th Senior Minister of the historic Madison Avenue Baptist Church in New York City. She is the first woman pastor in its 170-year history.

Sparks tours nationally with stand-up Rabbi Bob Alper and Muslim comic Gibran Saleem, as part of the Laugh in Peace Tour and writes an award-winning, nationally syndicated column through GateHouse Media, distributed to over 600 newspapers reaching over 21 million people in 36 states. She is the author of Laugh Your Way to Grace: Reclaiming the Spiritual Power of Humor. Sparks is the 20th recipient of the John L. Haber Award for Outstanding Contribution to the Arts given by the University of North Carolina (and comedian/alum Lewis Black), as well as a recipient of the Intersections International Award for interfaith work to promote justice and reconciliation among diverse communities.

When seeking help with math homework, the children of many engineers learn pretty quickly that there’s more than one way to solve nearly every problem. But figuring out additional methods of solving just one problem on their own can be mind-boggling.

Once instilled in a young mind, however, this maxim can be applied to virtually every subject studied and venture undertaken, not to mention to life’s inevitable challenges. It can form a healthy point of view: If one approach doesn’t work and the problem is important, try others until it’s solved.

In his book, How to Raise a Founder With Heart: A Guide For Parents to Develop Your Child’s Problem-Solving Abilities, engineer and award-winning inventor Jim Marggraff uses stories, suggestions and science to convey what he’s learned over time about the art and science of problem-solving. Not only is his advice useful for parents in general, but also for entrepreneurs — “founders” — of any age.

At 2 p.m. Saturday, July 27 in the Hall of Philosophy, Marggraff — who has co-founded and founded a total of seven IT and artificial intelligence companies thus far — will give a presentation titled, “Raising a Founder With Heart,” as part of the Chautauqua Women’s Club’s Contemporary Issues Forum.

Marggraff said he will “roll in some technology demos,” involve audience members and do an “Increased Cognition Break.”

Along with his wife, M.J. Marggraff — whose CIF talk last July focused on her book, Finding the WOW: How Dreams Take Flight at Midlife — he has raised a son and a daughter who are now in their 20s.

Unlike those of his offspring, Marggraff’s childhood circumstances growing up in four small towns in west-central Connecticut were not optimal. He said neither of his parents had attended college, his father was physically abusive, and when he was 4, his parents divorced.

“Being with a single parent and a couple of sisters — we had food, but were on the edge,” Marggraff said. “There was not much to live on. My mom worked part-time so she could spend more time with us.”

They all moved in with their maternal grandmother.

Because of a speech impediment, no one could understand him at school, and he was assigned to low-level courses. It was speech therapy that enabled him to move up to the highest-level courses by the fourth grade.

Marggraff’s biological paternal grandparents were “very supportive.” He said that his grandfather had gone to Harvard University at the turn of the 20th century and studied dentistry.

“My sisters, and mother and I would visit his house in Washington, (Connecticut),” Marggraff said. ”He had a big, glass, illuminated globe on a wood stand. … He would inevitably quiz us on the globe and geography.“

Marggraff’s fortune changed when he was accepted to Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1976. By entering its co-op program, he was able to combine his bachelor’s in electrical engineering and his master’s in computer science.

“Getting into college was a challenge, and paying for and staying in it, (especially) the last year when there wasn’t enough money,” Marggraff said.

As steward of his fraternity house, Phi Delta Theta, he earned his room and board. He also worked long hours at MIT’s Electronic Power Systems Engineering Laboratory. Marggraff said his boss at EPSEL gave him a personal loan so that he would not have to ask his mother and stepfather to mortgage their home to pay his tuition.

Soon after graduation, Marggraff and a friend came up with an idea for a real estate company while they were searching for a house to share. They called it HomeQuest and tried pitching it — unsuccessfully — to a group of real estate and startup investors.

In his book, Marggraff explains that it wasn’t enough to talk about what their business offered and how their system worked. They needed to show why HomeQuest mattered to them personally, so that prospective investors would have a reason to care about it.

Over a decade later, Marggraff would recall this lesson when co-founding his first successful business, Explorer Technologies.

In the meantime, he gained on-the-job experience at established corporations. When he interviewed at Rolm in Silicon Valley, Marggraff liked the California lifestyle.

“At that time, telecommunications was hot; it was a sizzling field,” he said.

After 18 months as a software engineer at Rolm Telecom, he followed friends to Packet Technologies in Campbell, California. Packet created “wide area networking” (WAN) — distributive software applications — for cable TV.

Yet just “two years out of school, I was watching a company unravel,” Marggraff said. “As an engineer, I was astounded at the things that were causing it to fail.”

He followed six colleagues to StrataCom, which 26 former employees founded in Cupertino, California, in 1986.

“I had an interest in entrepreneurship since I was a little kid trying to supplement my income,” Marggraff said. “After MIT, I caught the bug of ideas. … At StrataCom I was effectively a founding engineer.”

He co-initiated StrataCom’s Integrated Packet Exchange project. StrataCom developed Asynchronous Transfer Mode and FrameRelay high-speed WAN switching equipment, and produced FastPacket, the first commercial cell switch. According to Marggraff, this IT trio enabled the global connection of computers, and reliable high-speed communication.

He stayed at StrataCom through 1992, the year of its stock market launch.

Since then, wherever he has lived and worked, Marggraff has focused on technology-based learning. He has identified specific problems to solve, and forged ahead with solutions. 

To improve geographic literacy in the United States, Marggraff co-created an interactive talking globe for children called Odyssey Atlasphere. By holding a special stylus and pointing it to a spot on the globe, children could learn the name of the country they were pointing at, as well as some key facts about it.

As CEO of Explore Technologies, a company he co-founded in Sunnyvale, California, Marggraff launched the Odyssey globe in 1996. He also co-invented the Explorer interactive globe line.

In 1998, the educational entertainment and electronics company LeapFrog Enterprises acquired Explore. Initially, Marggraff became vice president of content, then president of the internet division. His leadership roles within the company changed at least yearly.

To improve literacy and reading skills, Marggraff co-invented the LeapPad Learning System — a series of interactive talking books. He applied the stylus technology developed for Explore’s interactive globe, wrote and narrated many of the early books displayed in this tablet and involved his children in the storytelling process.

The LeapPad tablet debuted in 1999, and quickly became the company’s top product — its annual sales began to soar.

For six months, Marggraff served as president of Ubiquity, a former LeapFrog subsidiary and Marggraff start-up for investigating new applications of NearTouch technology and LeapPad devices.

In 2001 and 2002, the LeapPad was the top-selling toy in the United States, and in 2003, its books and accessories were the country’s top-selling toys. Within five years, there was a LeapPad in 77% of U.S. households with children ages 4 to 7.

At LeapFrog, Marggraff also created the Fly Pentop Computer, a customizable pen with a computer inside that was used with the company’s proprietary digitized paper. It debuted in 2005, and won three Toy Association “Toy of the Year” awards.

In January 2005, he left LeapFrog to become CEO of Anoto USA, a cloud-based software provider headquartered in Sweden.

He then founded Livescribe in Oakland in 2007, and became the company’s chair and CEO. Its purpose was to solve the problem of whether to take notes or to listen during a discussion or class. In doing so, he invented the world’s first smartpens, including the Pulse and the Echo, which have won dozens of awards.

Anoto Group acquired Livescribe for $15 million in November 2015.

At that point, Marggraff had already started Eyefluence as a solution to the problem of “how to make fast, hands-free navigation for virtual and augmented reality.” Using eye-tracking and eye-interaction technology that interacts with a head-mounted display, he focused on transforming intent into action simply through eye movement.

When Google purchased Eyefluence in 2016, Marggraff worked as a director of Google’s virtual and augmented reality division. He also served as the director of product management.

In 2018, he left Google to tackle the “huge problem” of social isolation in the United States and globally, including isolation among older generations. Currently he’s “exploring the concept of creating the world’s first AI Social Agent to address issues around human connectedness.”

“This is my seventh company,” said Marggraff, who holds 36 patents. “It draws from what I’ve done in my other six companies.”

Through all his endeavors, Marggraff has developed a penchant for serial entrepreneurship.

“It starts with a problem to solve that I can identify,” he said. “It’s a mix of frustration and a passion to solve it. It starts with an idea that is usually outlandish or considered impossible. … I listen to comments. … If it’s not moving, almost reluctantly, I’ll move forward.”

Review by Howard Halle-

Depending on whom you ask, sometime within the next 20 to 50 years, the United States will become a minority/majority nation. That’s basically an oxymoronic way of saying that people of color will make up the largest piece of the population pie, a prospect unsettling to the considerable segment of white Americans who voted for a president more than happy to shred the Constitution to hold back the tide.

Nonetheless, demographic change is coming, and its stubborn statistical inevitability will utterly transform American life forever. Indeed, within the realm of contemporary art, one could argue that it already has.

As proof, look no further than the Fowler-Kellogg Art Center’s current offering, “Reconstructing Identities,” curated by Erika Diamond and closing Tuesday, which presents the work of five contemporary artists of color: Sonya Clark, April D. Felipe, Roberto Lugo, Jiha Moon and Wendy Red Star. The main question it poses, “Who gets to be represented in art?” is one that has been kicking around the art world for more than 20 years. In 1993, the Whitney Museum of American Art mounted what became the most controversial edition of its signature showcase: the Biennial. It was the first major institutional exhibition — anywhere — to tackle the rise of multiculturalism and its attendant storm of identity politics. The show included a 10-minute videotape of the Rodney King beating by artist George Holliday, while another artist, Daniel J. Martinez, designed an admission button that read: “I CAN’T IMAGINE EVER WANTING TO BE WHITE.” Needless to say, the reaction by the largely white, male critical establishment was resoundingly negative, with one — Michael Kimmelman of The New York Times — stating flatly, “I hate this show.”

There’s nothing quite as confrontational here as Martinez’s piece, though the debate it sparked still informs “Reconstructing Identities.” The show deals with, yes, identity, but also with how the Europeanized arc of history and culture might be bent to reflect an ever-diversifying society.

Case in point: a series of digital color photographs by Red Star. In them, Red Star, a Native American born in Billings, Montana, and raised on the Crow Reservation, debunks the romanticized view of Native Americans, using a play on the classical four seasons theme to expose the emptiness of Old West mythology. She poses within sets representing winter, spring, summer and fall, wearing native attire appropriate to the time of the year. Each backdrop is evidently fake, as are certain props like the inflatable plastic deer next to Red Star in her depiction of autumn. However, she subverts the artifice of each scene with her own resplendent presence, which is incontrovertibly real. Thus, she reclaims a cultural space for both herself and her heritage.

African American artist Clark deals with intractable issues surrounding race by delving into American history. Clark, a professor of art at Amherst College who is of Afro-Caribbean descent, explores the Civil War and how it continues to resonate today with a number of works, like a pair of small cases with a $5 bill laid inside each. One has the head of Abraham Lincoln, the “Great Emancipator,” wreathed in a huge Afro made of black fluff glued to the note. The other is entirely encrusted in translucent crystals that encase Lincoln’s image as if it were buried in ice, suggesting, perhaps, the broken promises and glacial pace of racial justice over the 150 years since slavery ended. Elsewhere, Clark presents a shelf with three small piles of yarn on it: one red, one white, one blue. They are the unraveled remains of the Stars and Bars, the former Confederate battle flag, which is now an icon of white supremacy. Here, Clark notes the irony of how this banner of hate shares the same color scheme as its emblematic opposite, Old Glory.

For Lugo, a Philadelphia native born to Puerto Rican parents, the issue of identity is bound up in his roles as potter, painter, musician and social activist. Having never received a formal art education, he is essentially self-taught, yet his bowls, plates, vases and figurines possess the ornate craftsmanship of the finest products that came out of the workshops of Ming-dynasty China or 18th-century France. His ceramics incorporate references to hip-hop and are often decorated with portraits of important personages from history and pop culture such as Frederick Douglass and rap artist, The Notorious B.I.G. In several wall-mounted medallions, Lugo evokes Luca della Robbia, the Florentine Renaissance master known for his vividly polychrome, tin-glazed terracotta statues and reliefs, with one object depicting the profile of Martin Luther King Jr., as if he were a Medici prince.

Born in Korea, Moon lives and works in Atlanta, and describes herself as a “cartographer of culture” who draws upon Eastern and Western art, as well as folk tradition, advertising and corporate design. This varied jumble of sources yields compositions that resemble phantasmagoric bouquets of symbols, including one large example recalling a kite or fan. It contains a painterly thicket of overlapping landscape and floral motifs interrupted here and there by smiley faces and Pennsylvania Dutch hex signs.

While these artists more or less tie their notion of identity specifically to race or ethnicity, another ceramicist, Felipe, ponders the more personal question, “Where do I belong?” Born in Queens to parents from the Caribbean, Felipe cites her mixed ancestry as the reason for never feeling like she belonged to any particular group, while still being regarded as a person of color. As a metaphor for the vicissitudes of finding a way to fit in, Felipe turns to the childhood tale of “The Ugly Duckling.” The story finishes with the titular character turning into a swan, but Felipe prefers a more inconclusive narrative frozen at the tipping point between duckling and swan, ugliness and beauty, social rejection and social acceptance. In one relief sculpture, Felipe imagines this developmental-limbo as a circular space shoved to one side of an expansive, irregularly shaped plaque. It’s filled with a cacophony of clashing tile patterns and occupied by a recumbent woman — possibly the artist herself — wearing a mask in the shape of a duck with a long bill. Her head and arms are plunked onto a curving green form that appears to be a plantain with the far end lopped off. She holds a long fall of hair, which seems to originate from the back of her head, though it’s hard to tell because the latter is cropped out of the picture.

The puzzling nature of this figure speaks to the larger enigma of identity and the contingent circumstances of its formation. We are all born with an identity that is at once innate and shaped by outside forces such as family, ancestry or community. Each of us is a unique being, attached by varying degree to one cohort or the other. The extent to which someone privileges the former over the latter really depends on psychology and a sense of self-worth. But it is also one of the realities of human nature that in times of duress or perceived threat, we cling more tightly to tribe — a situation that, as history teaches us, can be extremely destructive. We are living in such a moment, as the battle over who gets to be represented is being joined. “Reconstructing Identities” points to one hopeful outcome — over another that is far more dangerous.

Howard Halle is editor-at-large and chief art critic for Time Out New York.